Inside the Visual Effects from Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer

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It's time to go inside the visual effects from the biographical drama movie Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan.  Oppenheimer Cast:  Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Rami Malek, Florence Pugh, Benny Safdie, Michael Angarano, Josh Hartnett and Kenneth Branagh  Stream Oppenheimer now on Digital!

Transcript

00:00 This is a matter of life and death.

00:02 I can perform this miracle.

00:04 With our visual effects approach,

00:06 there's one sense in which

00:08 computer graphics is the obvious way to do it.

00:10 But going down that route,

00:12 I didn't feel we were going to get anything

00:14 that would feel personal and unique

00:16 to this character.

00:18 When you do Chris's movies, things that when you read

00:20 a script you normally would think would be

00:22 visual effects, you know that you're going

00:24 to be doing this stuff practically.

00:26 On this show, a lot of the effects work is

00:28 special effects and visual effects

00:30 very much bundled together.

00:32 Andrew, together with Scott Fisher,

00:34 they had to film the world

00:36 of quantum physics.

00:38 Their whole unit was one big science project.

00:40 I was daily very jealous.

00:42 The two of them did a lot of R&D.

00:44 They did a lot of experimentation.

00:46 They came up with some very interesting analog methods.

00:48 You know, it was a little bit

00:50 getting inside of Chris's head to see

00:52 what he wanted to see.

00:54 So we would do tests and play with stuff

00:56 and try to figure it out.

00:58 It was constantly evolving. You show it to Chris,

01:00 he's like, "Yeah, that's the right idea.

01:02 Now we're going to do it in IMAX."

01:04 We used a lot of different traditional methodologies,

01:06 you know, working with cloud tanks,

01:08 water, all different kinds of macro lenses,

01:10 high-speed cameras,

01:12 and some very low-tech approaches

01:14 to some of these concepts.

01:16 The thing that they did in the bedroom with Killian,

01:18 the spinning atom,

01:20 it just allows you to use takes

01:22 and footage where he's actually looking at something.

01:24 You know, Oppenheimer

01:26 sees things in sort of different dimensions,

01:28 so sometimes when his brain

01:30 is going, the background is vibrating,

01:32 and that's all done in-camera.

01:34 That's the beauty of, like,

01:36 stuff that you do in-camera,

01:38 is it can be full-size,

01:40 it can be half-size, and depending upon

01:42 how you photograph it, you know, if it looks right,

01:44 then the scale's right.

01:46 We wanted that Trinity Explosion to be both

01:48 beautiful and mesmerizing,

01:50 but horrifying in equal measure.

01:52 I think for modern-day effects,

01:54 this is kind of bigger than normal.

01:56 Back in the day, a lot of--this was commonplace

01:58 on a lot of movies, but I think now

02:00 they're, well, not quite this big.

02:02 Okay, we're hot. Here we go. Roll cameras.

02:04 Rolling. Rolling, rolling.

02:06 And...

02:08 What we were able

02:10 to come out with

02:12 and get into the finished film, to me,

02:14 is extraordinarily beautiful,

02:16 but also very frightening.

02:18 (whooshing)

02:20 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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